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YIVO digitizes writer Chaim Grade’s archive, a Yiddish treasure with a soap opera backstory
(JTA) — Years ago, when I worked at the Forward, I had a cameo in a real-life Yiddish drama.
A cub reporter named Max Gross sat just outside my office, where he answered the phones. A frequent caller was Inna Grade, the widow of the Yiddish writer Chaim Grade and a fierce guardian of his literary legacy. Mrs. Grade would badger poor Max in dozens of phone calls, especially when a Forward story referred kindly to the Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. Grade’s widow described Singer as a “blasphemous buffoon” whose fame and reputation, she was convinced, came at the expense of her husband’s.
As Max explains in his 2008 memoir, “From Schlub to Stud,” Mrs. Grade “became a bit of a joke around the paper.” And yet in Yiddish literary circles, her protectiveness of one of the 20th century’s most important Yiddish writers was serious business: Because Inna Grade kept such a tight hold on her late husband’s papers — Chaim Grade (pronounced “Grah-deh”) died in 1982 — a generation of scholars was thwarted in taking his true measure.
Inna Grade died in 2010, leaving no signed will or survivors, and the contents of her cluttered Bronx apartment became the property of the borough’s public administrator. In 2013, Chaim Grade’s personal papers, 20,000-volume library, literary manuscripts and publication rights were awarded to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the National Library of Israel. They are now stored in YIVO headquarters on Manhattan’s W. 16th Street.
This week YIVO and the NLI will announce the completion of the digitization of “The Papers of Chaim Grade and Inna Hecker Grade,” making the entire archive publicly accessible online. When the folks at YIVO invited me to come and look at the Grade collection, I knew I had to invite Max, not just because of his connection to Inna Grade but because he has become a critically acclaimed novelist in his own right: His 2020 novel “The Lost Shtetl,” which imagines a Jewish village in Poland that has somehow escaped the Holocaust, is in many ways an homage to the Yiddish literary tradition.
We met on Thursday with the YIVO staff, who were tickled by the T-shirt Max was wearing, which had a picture of Chaim Grade and the phrase “Grade is my homeboy.” (Max said his wife bought it for him, although neither could imagine the market for such a shirt.)
Stefanie Halpern, director of the YIVO archives, and novelist Max Gross discuss a thick file containing news clippings relating to the late Yiddish novelist Chaim Grade at YIVO’s Manhattan offices, Feb. 2, 2023. (New York Jewish Week)
The Grade papers — manuscripts, photographs, correspondence, lectures, speeches, essays — are stored in folders in gray boxes, whose neatness belies the years of effort that went into putting them in order. Jonathan Brent, executive director and CEO of YIVO, described for us the Grades’ apartment, which he visited shortly after Inna’s death.
“It was like a combination of my grandmother’s apartment and a writer’s home,” he said. “Everything was books, books to the ceiling. You open a drawer in the kitchen where you think there’ll be knives and forks, there are books, there are manuscripts. You open the cabinet in the bathroom, there are more manuscripts and books and books…. But the thing I remember most is that at the top of a shelf there was that much dust.” He held his fingers about two inches apart.
Inna Grade was Chaim Grade’s second wife. The writer was born in Vilna (now in Lithuania) in 1910. He was able to flee east during the Nazi occupation, leaving behind his mother and his first wife under the assumption that the Germans would only target adult men. It was a tragic miscalculation, and their deaths would haunt Grade the rest of his life. Inna Hecker was born in Ukraine in 1925, and met Grade in Moscow during the war. Married in 1945, they immigrated to the United States in 1948.
Chaim Grade had already established a reputation as a poet, playwright and prose stylist before the war; English translations of his novels “The Agunah” and “The Yeshiva” and serial publication of his novels in the Yiddish press brought him recognition in America for what the Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse calls a “Dostoyevskian talent to animate in fiction the destroyed Talmudic civilization of Europe.” Columbia University professor Jeremy Dauber, in a YIVO release, says that Grade was possessed “by the spirit of the yeshiva world he’d left behind; then possessed by the spirits and memories of those who’d been murdered by the Nazis.”
Stefanie Halpern, director of the YIVO archives, showed us the physical evidence of that possession: Grade’s notebooks, in which he wrote down ideas and inspiration in a careful Yiddish script; manuscripts for at least two unpublished dramatic works, “The Dead Can’t Rise Up” and “Hurban” (“Sacrifice”); a photograph of Grade standing amidst the ruins of Vilna during his only visit after the war; pictures of the Bronx apartment taken when the couple was still alive, book-filled but still tidy.
Halpern also showed us the Yiddish typewriter recovered from the apartment, with what is believed to be the last page he worked on still rolled in its platen.
Chaim Grade’s typewriter, preserved in the condition it was found when the Yiddish author died in 1982, contains what are apparently the last lines he ever wrote. (New York Jewish Week)
The archivists are also careful to give Inna her due. After arriving in America she studied literature and received a master’s degree from Columbia, and often translated her husband’s work. Thanks to her, hundreds of clippings of Grade’s work and articles about him have survived.
Her correspondence reflects the lengths she went to protect her husband’s legacy during and after his lifetime, including a bizarre and lengthy letter to the Vatican complaining about Singer. “She was a brilliant and creative person, devoted in a way only a widow can be,” said Brent. “And perhaps devoted to a maddening extent.”
If all that sounds like the stuff of Jewish fiction, it is: In 1969, Cynthia Ozick wrote a novella called “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” about Yiddish writers very much like Grade consumed with envy for a writer very much like Singer. “They hated him for the amazing thing that had happened to him — his fame — but this they never referred to,” wrote Ozick. “Instead they discussed his style: his Yiddish was impure, his sentences lacked grace and sweep, his paragraph transitions were amateur, vile.”
Halpern showed us a mailgram from Inna to the Forward that makes it clear that she and her husband read and hated the story. In it she describes Ozick as “no less grotesque than evil.”
For all of the gothic Yiddish aspects of its retrieval, “this is probably the single most important literary acquisition in YIVO’s postwar history,” Brent said of the archive. He described publishing projects already underway with Schocken Books and other publishers that will draw on the material.
Max and I discussed what it felt like to see what had become “a bit of a joke” around the Forward office placed at the center of an epic exercise in literary preservation. Max was struck by the way Inna’s personality came through in the papers. “This was her,” he said. “Her obsession, her struggle, all these things. It was definitely remarkable to see that.”
I recalled overhearing his conversations with Inna, and how her behavior could seem funny and exasperating, but also admirable and more than a little sad — in that her devotion to her husband’s reputation may also have prevented scholars from doing the work that would have made him better known.
“Exactly, but that’s one of the reasons why you get into Yiddish literature, because all of these things are true at the same time,” said Max. “Those kinds of scores, rivalries, feuds within Yiddish literature is what is so great about it. It is great to see that somebody really cared and that literature was taken so seriously. And the pettiness was something you couldn’t quite divest from the rest of it.”
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‘He has repeatedly capitulated to Zionist pressure’: Leftist groups to protest Mamdani on Oct. 7
A raft of pro-Palestinian and democratic socialist groups will protest against New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on the three-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks, accusing the mayor of capitulating to pro-Israel pressure since taking office.
More than 20 local organizations, most of them college chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine or Young Democratic Socialists of America, are participating in the event, which will culminate with a rally at City Hall. (Young Democratic Socialists America is the student offshoot of the DSA.)
The groups’ complaints against the mayor include his allowing a law to take effect that allows NYPD to implement security perimeters at places of worship and launching a plan to combat antisemitism that includes funding for Jewish community groups that do not disavow Israel.
“Zohran Mamdani campaigned on promises to the Palestine movement,” the groups said in a caption alongside a poster for the event. “He has betrayed his own alleged values, failing to make those promises a reality. Instead, he has repeatedly capitulated to Zionist pressure.”
The protest comes even as Mamdani, who drew on the support of local progressive groups in his run for office, continues to hammer the Israeli government and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from City Hall. But the protest — which appears to have split the city’s DSA movement — revealed growing discontent from the far-left with how Mamdani has governed.
It also underscored how uncompromising the left flank of the democratic socialists can be on matters related to Israel.
Why leftist groups are protesting Mamdani
Mamdani rode into office last November on a swell of pro-Palestinian support and democratic socialist organizing power. He rejected many of the pro-Israel norms of New York City campaign trail, including by promising to arrest Netanyahu if he ever visited New York and calling the war in Gaza a genocide.
Since taking office, Mamdani has revoked an anti-BDS executive order signed by his predecessor, Eric Adams, and the city’s previously accepted definition of antisemitism from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. Mamdani also publicly defended pro-Palestinian student protesters detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and opposed the West Bank land sales at local synagogues.
And even in a public appearance conceding he did not have the authority to arrest Netanyahu, Mamdani reiterated his stance that the Israeli premier is a war criminal.
Still, he has tried to court Jewish groups by pledging to address antisemitism through his new multimillion dollar strategy that allocates $6.4 million to community organizations. He has also visited with Jews in all five boroughs to build community relations.
Their criticism of Mamdani for the security perimeter bill reflected disappointment in the mayor for something he couldn’t do much about. The bill, Int. No. 1-B, passed in March with a supermajority, meaning he was unable to veto it. Rather than sign it into law, Mamdani did not take action on it and it became law after 30 days. (He vetoed a separate bill creating a protest buffer zone for schools that had passed with a simple majority.)
The protesting groups argue the bill criminalizes protests against synagogues that host “illegal land sales” of property in the West Bank. Additionally, the chapters take issue with Mamdani’s antisemitism strategy providing security infrastructure to “Zionist synagogues” that hold these sales. The bill provides the same security to all synagogues regardless of their affiliation with Israel.
The online poster for the event states in its caption that Mamdani’s Strategy to Combat Antisemitism provides “funding for Zionist propagandist groups” such as the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York. The council works in partnership with the UJA-Federation of New York to fight against antisemitism and foster support for Israel, including sponsoring tours to the country. Under a Mamdani-created program, JCRC will work with grassroots groups on programs that include education, victim support, data collection and combating online hate.
The mayor’s office declined the Forward’s request for comment. The organizations involved did not immediately respond to inquiries, except for Lehman College Young Democratic Socialists of America which declined.
The post ‘He has repeatedly capitulated to Zionist pressure’: Leftist groups to protest Mamdani on Oct. 7 appeared first on The Forward.
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Israelis don’t lose sleep over Mamdani. Why is Netanyahu focused on him?
(JTA) — Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly this year came at a critical time for Israel. Talks were underway to resolve the conflicts in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, and Israel was awaiting the outcome of the on-again, off-again U.S.-Iran ceasefire negotiations. The country had also just been sanctioned by 12 countries, led by Britain, over its West Bank policies.
Yet it was Zohran Mamdani, the New York mayor who has virtually no say in international relations, who drew the Israeli prime minister’s fiercest, most lengthy criticism. Mamdani, Netanyahu charged, was an antisemite, a “buddy” of Hamas, the husband of a supporter of the Oct. 7 massacre and the friend of a 9/11 enthusiast.
The U.N. address wasn’t the only time in the weeks leading up to Israel’s Oct. 27 election that Netanyahu focused his sights on Mamdani in an unusual forum. In August, Netanyahu’s Likud party launched an election billboard campaign showing Mamdani alongside Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, and Hezbollah Secretary-General Naim Qassem, with the slogan, “They want Netanyahu to lose, don’t let them win.”
In the weeks leading up to his visit to U.N. headquarters in New York, the prime minister and Mamdani went at each other on social media, with Mamdani calling for Netanyahu’s arrest in New York (while acknowledging he had no power to order it), and the prime minister accusing the mayor of antisemitism and support of Hamas.
Netanyahu is making the New York mayor a central bogeyman this election season – is it working?
It’s true that Mamdani, who is Muslim, is unpopular across most of the Jewish political spectrum in Israel. During his election campaign and since taking office, Mamdani has constantly accused Israel of genocide and ethnic cleansing, charges most Jewish Israelis and politicians from both coalition and opposition parties reject.
But it is unlikely that the average Israeli would base his or her vote on a candidate’s attitude towards the mayor of New York. After all, Israelis have many other issues on their plate that are closer to home, such as the state of national security, accountability for the failures that allowed Hamas to carry out its deadly raids inside Israel on Oct. 7 and the exemption of ultra-Orthodox Israelis from IDF service.
Still, Netanyahu aide Caroline Glick, the prime minister’s international affairs adviser, said in an interview it was “obvious” and “self-explaining” that the prime minister would push back against a person who has been “spewing antisemitism.”
Glick repeated Netanyahu’s claim in his speech that New York Jews felt unsafe as a result of Mamdani’s rhetoric and policies. She said Mamdani “got what he ordered up” in the premier’s U.N. address. (Mamdani pushed back sharply on what he called Netanyahu’s “baseless lies” in the speech.)
Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, said Mamdani started it. Mamdani “began a smear campaign already in July,” Danon said, referring to the video in which Mamdani called on the federal government to arrest Netanyahu, and the beefs on social media since then. Mamdani “fuels the fire and incites, and our approach is not to keep quiet versus inciters,” Danon wrote to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in response to a query.
There are plenty of other targets that Netanyahu can attack to bolster his reputation as a fighter. He took aim in his U.N. speech at the “moral cowards” who left the hall when he rose to speak, the Syrian president Ahmed al-Sharaa, French President Emmanuel Macron, Turkish President Erdogan, Qatar, and the protestors outside the U.N. building.
So why did Mamdani consume so much oxygen?
Guy Levy, a spokesperson for Netanyahu’s Likud party, explained that Mamdani is not just a personal adversary but an emblem of a larger struggle. “Mamdani is a symbol of the rise in the West of the connection between the radical Left and Islamists and antisemites,” he told JTA.
That connects with a larger theme in Netanyahu’s campaign: arguing that a governing coalition without him would be dependent on a majority-Arab party and on the left-wing Democrats to get enough seats to form a majority. As such, he contends, they would be unable or unwilling to safeguard Israeli security interests.
The campaign’s most recent slogan is, “It’s either the Right or Palestine” (the two words rhyme in Hebrew), indicating that a rival government would agree to Palestinian statehood, which many Israelis view as a danger. Mamdani, according to Levy, is part of the same left-wing/Arab camp; attacking Mamdani is therefore an attack against Netanyahu’s political rivals. (Mamdani appears to favor a one-state solution – as do many on Israel’s right, although envisioning a very different type of single state.)
Dahlia Scheindlin, a veteran Israeli-American pollster and senior political analyst for the left-wing Haaretz newspaper and a staunch Netanyahu critic, speculated that the decision to go after Mamdani may not have represented a premeditated strategy but rather a “scattershot” approach born out of the prime minister’s poor performance in polls.
“First of all, not much has helped Netanyahu electorally,” Scheindlin said in a phone interview with JTA. “His party is stuck in the polls. It hasn’t changed in a very long time.” She noted that the Likud is currently polling at around 20 to 22 seats or even lower and that the bloc of parties loyal to him for forming a coalition hovers at about 50 to 52 seats – far short of the 61 needed to be in the majority.
Netanyahu has been pushing two major themes in his election campaign, according to Scheindlin: a “positive” theme, stressing his government’s successes against Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran; and a “negative” theme against likely Arab participation in a rival government led by Yashar party head Gadi Eisenkot, who is polling best right now.
The attacks against Mamdani fit into the negative frame, Scheindlin argued.
“The one about Mamdani plays into the theme that the whole world is against us, the world is being taken over by Muslims,” Scheindlin said. “These are openly racialized and racist themes against an Arab party and the Israeli government, against Muslims and anywhere else in the world.”
She added that Netanyahu and his government have been claiming that “any criticism coming from Europe of Israel is all because Europe has been taken over by Muslims,” and the New York focus now only expands that message in arguing that radical Islam has taken over the world.
During this government’s tenure, Israel’s standing in both Europe and the U.S. has plummeted, with many European countries imposing sanctions, arms sales blocks and harsh criticism of Israel’s actions in the West Bank and Gaza. Now Netanyahu “is going to be the defender by attacking people like Mamdani rhetorically and politically,” she said.
Scheindlin said she did not believe that Mamdani’s presence in the Likud’s election campaign would sway any voters. “The Mamdani sign came and went. I would doubt if most Israelis even remember it right now,” she said. And while the attacks against Mamdani generally “played into his message,” the bottom line is that Netanyahu is “trying everything” at this point in the campaign.
Yaakov Katz, the former editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post, viewed the speech less as a desperate play and more as a natural part of Netanyahu’s election campaign. In an interview with CBS, Katz said that the speech’s idea was for Israelis to think that “The world is against us no matter what, but thank God we have a leader, in this case, Netanyahu, who can stand up to everyone and stick it to them.” Katz added that “this could bring him some votes, or at the very least consolidate the base.”
Calling Mamdani an antisemite and blaming him for Jews feeling unsafe in New York “plays out well,” Katz said to CBS, “because Israelis look at people like Mamdani and they don’t see much of a difference, whether it’s Mamdani or it’s President Erdogan of Turkey, or it’s some other tent encampment or protest on the streets of Sydney or Paris or London. It’s one and the same.”
With the U.N. speech behind him and more pressing issues to address, including new revelations about warnings Netanyahu received prior to Oct. 7 and the flydubai attack last week, the Mamdani-Netanyahu fight has receded into the rear-view mirror. But if Netanyahu is reelected or if he stays on as caretaker prime minister, the issue will likely resurface.
Mamdani focuses on Netanyahu now, but he has made clear over his career that his problem is generally with Israel, whichever government is leading it. Even if a new administration takes over in Jerusalem, it may find itself at odds with the mayor of New York – and with the growing movement of young democratic socialists that he represents.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Israelis don’t lose sleep over Mamdani. Why is Netanyahu focused on him? appeared first on The Forward.
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The Philadelphia teacher who pretended to be Palestinian raised alarms for Jewish groups before she became infamous
(JTA) —
The first time most of the world heard Hannah Gann’s name was in late September, when the 34-year-old Philadelphia high school teacher and activist confessed to having fabricated a Palestinian and Black identity — with media reports revealing she was Jewish in real life.
But Jason Holtzman, director of Philadelphia’s Jewish Community Relations Council, first heard Gann’s name long before that: in December 2023.
At that time, he recalled to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, she “made some pretty strident remarks” at a local rally called “Flood Philly For Palestine,” an apparent reference to the “Al-Aqsa Flood,” Hamas’s name for its Oct. 7, 2023, attacks.
In video from the event shared with JTA, Gann said in reference to children in Gaza, “We owe them to take it to the streets and f–k the police until Palestine is free.”
Gann would appear on the JCRC’s radar several more times before her name hit the news for being “the Palestinian Rachel Dolezal,” when her story — accompanied by Philadelphia Inquirer reporting that she has Jewish family living in Israel — ricocheted across the internet to gain her instant notoriety. (The real-life Dolezal, a white woman who posed as Black for years and held a NAACP leadership role while teaching Africana Education at a Pacific Northwest college, has meanwhile expressed interest in meeting Gann.)
Gann’s revelations have led to the dissolution of the local pro-Palestinian educators group she had helped to lead since 2024. After leaving her Instagram confessions public for more than a week, Gann’s account was deactivated in the last few days.
Yet now that Gann’s background has grabbed headlines, Jewish groups alarmed by her behavior said the real story is being missed.
“It’s just being reported as if she simply is guilty of fraud, that she’s the new Rachel Dolezal,” Holtzman told JTA. “It’s missing part of the story, which is that she’s also an extremist who has spread antisemitic tropes and has brought inflammatory content into the classroom.”
A general view of the School District of Philadelphia offices on December 31, 2015 in Philadelphia City. (Paul Marotta/Getty Images)
A catalog of troubling incidents
In the JCRC’s monitoring of the School District of Philadelphia, Gann’s name pops up often. In 2024 she helped organize a pro-Palestinian “teach-in” project, an unofficial event staged for teachers in the district that the JCRC says “directed educators to materials that erased Israel from maps” and “characterized October 7 as ‘resistance.’”
That year she also posted an Instagram image of a fist rising from the ground holding a firearm, with paragliders — a symbol of the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023 — visible in the background, one of many social media posts of hers that employed extreme language or imagery around Israel.
A key part of Jewish critics’ charges, that Gann brought her activism into the classroom or into her lesson plans, is harder to pinpoint. But in one screenshot of her whiteboard that she posted to social media, Gann appeared to have planned a lesson on “Black Power & Palestine.” In addition, district personnel who had visited her class in 2024 found that it “contained a ‘Palestine will be free’ poster, a Palestinian flag, a keffiyeh, and a map of Israel filled with a keffiyeh design,” Holtzman claimed.
Gann did not respond to multiple JTA requests for comment.
JCRC officials and a local Jewish activist group had pushed the district to discipline Gann over her conduct before the scandal over her identity broke — including, they said, presenting the superintendent with a full record of Jewish parent concerns this March. But such efforts, they say, fell largely on deaf ears.
“We’ve pointed this out to the school district many times over the years,” Holtzman told JTA. He added that, in the JCRC’s view, Gann’s rally appearances and social media activity were in violation of district codes of conduct governing staff activity that could damage the district’s reputation — with her recent admission of falsifying her ethnic identity potentially violating an ethics code requiring employees to avoid falsification in their personal records.
“And they’ve basically done nothing about it,” he said.
It wasn’t only Holtzman and the JCRC urging the School District of Philadelphia to take some kind of action against Gann. Local Jewish activists filed a federal civil rights complaint against her and fellow activists in the district with whom she had formed a coalition, even entering into mediation with the district in an effort to establish new guidelines around personnel behavior.
The complaint argued, among other points, that Gann’s social media — where she has posted many controversial messages about Israel — should be considered an extension of her classroom.
Yet Gann continued to teach 10th grade at The Workshop School, a public high school in West Philadelphia with a focus on project-based learning. Under pressure from her fellow activists, she recently came clean about her identity.
A surprising confession
“I lied about my family and have been lying for years,” she wrote on Instagram on Yom Kippur. “I have no Palestinian or Tunisian heritage. I am a white woman of significant privilege and wealth. Anyone who supported me was manipulated.”
Gann’s confession took even the Philadelphia Jewish groups who had been tracking her behavior by surprise. They told JTA they had not realized she had been identifying herself as Palestinian, nor that she was actually Jewish. Some of her fellow activists, in their own social media posts, said she had confided to them in the past that she was Jewish — while also continuing to insist she was Palestinian.
While the Philadelphia Inquirer has quoted activists accusing her of having “Israeli settler family,” it was unclear to the Jews who spoke to JTA whether Gann’s Israeli family actually lived in settlements in the occupied West Bank or whether the activists simply refer to all Israelis as settlers. Giving public comment at prior school board meetings, Gann had proclaimed, “I can’t visit my family in Palestine,” and “I have pushed myself to teach through the agony of my family living in a warzone, and only taken one day off this entire school year.”
To some Jews, such parsing is almost besides the point; they see the entire conversation around Gann’s identity as a distraction.
The bigger story, they said, is that she was using her position as a public school educator to push anti-Israel advocacy that included falsehoods about Israel without fear of punishment: a microcosm of what they see as a larger trend of growing pro-Palestinian sentiment among K-12 educators in many school districts and teachers’ unions that has raised alarm among Jewish groups.
A spokesperson for an ad hoc group of Jewish educators and families in the Philadelphia area, who asked to remain anonymous owing to what they viewed as death threats from a member of Gann’s former coalition, told JTA in a statement that the district failed to express interest in Gann until the scandal.
“Harm to the Jewish community is never addressed or rectified” by the district, the representative for the School District of Philadelphia Jewish Family Association (SDP JFA) said in an email.
A spokesperson for the School District of Philadelphia declined to comment on whether the district would be disciplining Gann or if it had communicated with Jewish groups about her behavior prior to last week.
“The District is making support available to the Workshop School staff and students, as needed,” the spokesperson wrote in an email to JTA.
Meanwhile, one of the pro-Palestinian activist groups formerly associated with Gann, Philly Educators for Palestine, announced last week that “after much reflection,” it would dissolve, though “The work continues.” Its parent group, the Racial Justice Organizing Committee, said it would be going on hiatus.
Prior to its announcement, Philly Educators for Palestine had publicly disassociated from Gann and had called for the district to discipline her.
“It’s one of the first times where I think that I really have common ground with the Philadelphia Educators for Palestine,” Holtzman quipped.
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators block roads as they rally in front of Philadelphia City Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on September 10, 2024, ahead of the presidential debate between US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. (Andrew Thomas / AFP via Getty Images)
Civil rights complaint filed
In 2024, SDP JFA filed a Title VI civil rights investigation with the U.S. Department of Education against a group of pro-Palestinian teachers in the district, alleging, among other things, that students had been targeted on the basis of their Jewish identity. Joining the complaint were the JCRC, the Anti-Defamation League and StandWithUs, a pro-Israel advocacy group.
The groups eventually proceeded to mediation with the district, which agreed to institute changes such as drafting a district-wide anti-harassment statement; undergoing an anti-discrimination policy review; and instituting new training for staff, according to a copy of the resolution agreement viewed by JTA. Jewish groups, however, charge that the recommendations were never fully implemented.
The names of the teachers in the federal investigation were redacted in official filings. But according to emails shared with JTA, Gann was one of the named parties in the ADL’s amended complaint.
“Evidence suggests that Ms. Gann is utilizing her actual classroom and social media platforms as a digital extension of her classroom to disseminate antisemitic rhetoric, engage in prohibited political campaigning, and promote extremist ideologies to her students,” a letter sent by SDP JFA this May reads.
Following that email, Gann on Instagram made oblique references to the allegations, calling her unnamed critics “genocide enthusiasts who love to call the School District about what I’m teaching.” She also posted a fake lesson plan from her classroom whiteboard with scheduled “lessons” including “Jesus Was Palestinian.”
The Jewish parents and teachers in SDP JFA say their frustrations with Gann are also informed by an even more antagonistic encounter with Keziah Ridgeway, a fellow teacher and former ally of Gann’s who at one point had joined Gann in holding signs reading “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” at a school board meeting.
In 2024, following a controversy around one of Ridgeway’s lesson plans and an SDP JFA campaign against her, Ridgeway, believing herself targeted by Jewish online harassers, posted several of the group members’ names to Instagram.
In posts viewed by JTA, she accompanied this list with another post referencing the phrase, “Ain’t no fun when the rabbit got the gun,” which refers to a sudden reversal in power dynamics. In a third post, Ridgeway asked followers for recommendations for “Black owned [gun emoji] shops in or near Philly.”
The Jewish parents interpreted the series of posts as a threat directed at them, and reported Ridgeway to the district, ultimately leading to her suspension for a year; she has sued the district, alleging anti-Islamic bias. Gann forcefully advocated for Ridgeway’s reinstatement at board meetings.
Following Gann’s recent revelations, Ridgeway, too, disowned her in an Instagram video. “I can no longer be in community with someone who caused so much harm,” Ridgeway wrote on social media.
Ridgeway declined to comment to JTA, citing ongoing litigation.
Even if they feel it’s for the wrong reasons, the members of SDP JFA still want to see action taken against Gann. They are seeking to capitalize on her newfound infamy by renewing their calls to district officials to discipline her and “ameliorate the damage done to the Jewish community.”
Such demands echo communications Jewish parents have already been sending to the district for the better part of two years. In an email to administrators last year, they sought to sum up their complaints: “Allowing Ms. Gann to remain in a teaching position sends the message that Jewish students’ safety and dignity are not valued — that their teacher can publicly call for their eradication without consequence.”
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